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An American Birdcore undertaking

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We dedicate this entry to Pope St. Gregory the Great, patron of musicians and singers.

Hello again, readers.

The week and a half since my last post has been pretty encouraging for me. I got to meet with a voice therapist who further assuaged my concerns about the throat issue I’ve been dealing with. Turns out it’s nothing that should stop me from singing, and in fact might even be a simple case of globus hystericus, now more commonly known as globus pharyngeus but originally named after the hysterical disposition of those diagnosed—meaning I may just need to chill out. Dethroning Mammon can make a guy pretty anxiety-prone, but the certainty of our victory means there’s really nothing for us to worry about.

I ended up recording a demo of a new Too Much Gold song called “Reframe” which deals with the change in approach I’ve had to make in the ongoing culture war after going down an erroneous path back in 2014. Dethrone Mammon is one aspect of said change, another being a vocal style different from the aggressive rock singing I used to do with Archive Nights. “Reframe” features a first attempt at this new style which I anticipate will develop with further training and performing. I’m still occasionally tempted to revert back to my old ways, but with the way my throat is I can’t do it anymore without hurting myself, and was likely hurting myself even back when it was my norm.

This entry derives its namesake from the lyrics of “Reframe” and will accordingly focus on issues relevant to the mentioned adjustment in cultural warfare tactics.

At this juncture I want to bring up the work of Dr. E. Michael Jones, which has benefited me enormously in my efforts to turn from my former erroneous path. Although I didn’t really delve into Dr. Jones’ work until the latter part of 2015, I realize now that I had previously had some indirect exposure to it via other, less credible sources, namely The End of Zion‘s article “The Holocaust Hoax and the Jewish Promotion of Perversity” and David Duke’s exposé on the sexual revolution citing Nathan Abrams’ article on Jewish involvement in the American pornography industry. Whereas End‘s article features Jones’ discussion of the military use of pornography in Israeli-occupied Palestine, Jones actually describes Abrams’ article as a rewriting of his own written the previous year. It is salient to note that Nathan Abrams is in fact Jewish, so taking him at his word that Jews are highly involved in the pornography industry can only dubiously warrant the inevitable accusations of anti-Semitism that follow such an intellectual decision. This is, of course, unless Abrams is himself an anti-Semite, in which case one wonders whether Jewish Quarterly is an anti-Semitic publication.

For those unfamiliar with blogs like The End of Zion or people like David Duke, the difference between an approach like theirs—which I had confusedly imbibed to a dangerous degree before—and that of Dr. Jones to many of the same general issues, e.g., the corruption of Western sexual morality at the hands of the Jews, is that Dr. Jones comes at them from an authentically Catholic perspective. Had I known more people like Dr. Jones exist upon my discovery of said general issues back in 2013 with my viewing of Br. Nathanael’s video on why Jews push gay marriage, I may not have felt compelled to resort to non-Catholic sources in my search for understanding. It should be said that whereas Br. Nathanael is a Russian Orthodox Christian and thus offers a perspective rather close to what I was looking for, his relatively shallow analysis, eccentric demeanor, ultimately schismatic status, and lack of a viable following led me to sources that go so far as to call Br. Nathanael’s reliability into question as per his Jewish ethnic background.

There are two major points to address here. One is the failure of modern Catholics to understand their own religion’s teaching on the Jews and Judaism, largely a result of failures on the part of the clergy following the Second Vatican Council, and the other is the extent to which race realism has a place in the conversation.

On the first point, it must be said that a seeming majority of Catholics in the modern West and even throughout the globe have uncritically bought John Paul II’s saying that—contrary to what St. John Chrysostom and countless others in Catholic Church history have had to say—the Jews are Catholics’ “‘elder brothers’ in the faith of Abraham.”

For someone uneducated in matters of Christian orthodoxy the statement may sound plausible enough, but for the the rest of us it can’t possibly be true. This is for the biblical reason that “if you be Christ’s, then are you the seed of Abraham, heirs according to the promise” (Galatians 3:29); which is to say, Christianity is the faith of Abraham. Though accidentally different from the religion of the Old Testament Jews, Christianity, i.e., Catholicism, is substantially the same. Indeed, Jesus Christ did “not come to destroy [the law or the prophets of the Old Testament], but to fulfill” (Matthew 5:17). Today’s so-called Jews, who according to other parts of the Bible are not even worthy of being called such, are defined by their rejection of the claims of Catholicism and thus their rejection of the faith of Abraham. As such, they cannot be construed as being “in the faith of Abraham,” much less as being the “elder brothers” of those who are.

This widespread misconception among modern Catholics along with the Second Vatican Council’s explicit condemnation of anti-Semitism, which the document containing said condemnation leaves undefined, rubbed me in a seriously wrong way as I made my way towards conversion to Catholicism from the nebulous, anarchistic religious views I had developed as a university student. Basically, what I was looking for from Catholicism seemed to have been abandoned by the modern Church in favor of liberal ideas more like what I sought to leave behind. I had learned in a soul-crushingly painful way that the Jews were historically adversarial to the Church and were known for subverting the morals of Christian countries, but the Church seemed to have let down its guard, inviting evil into its own bosom at the peril of the faithful. If anti-Semitism meant, as it is often framed to mean, any perspective on the Jews that makes Jews uncomfortable, isn’t simple adherence to Catholicism an anti-Semitic act? In this light, how could the true Church ever condemn anti-Semitism? Wary that I might otherwise become ensnared in a diabolical and sodomitical conspiracy, I was eventually convinced by what is known as the sedevacantist position, the general thesis of which is that the Seat of Peter is vacant and has been since the time of Vatican II.

My attempts to avoid trouble by way of sedevacantism were to be frustrated, however. I was baptized by a sedevacantist priest in the spring of 2014, but found next to no solidarity at the church I began frequenting. Not helping my case was my carrying over the habit of cannabis use from my pre-Christian days, which I had recently taken up again as a means to relieve the anxiety I felt at having to go my faith journey alone. (I eventually sought a conditional baptism over concern that my original baptism may have been invalidated on account of cannabis intoxication, but that is a story for another time.) It wasn’t long after I started going to the sedevacantist chapel that the priest there betrayed his ignorance on the Jews by alluding reverently to a rabbi who is purported to have had the name of the Messiah revealed to him. I had seen the video he was talking about before, and when I rewatched it upon his reminding me of it, I was alarmed to hear the ingratiating tone of the Protestant narrator towards all things Jewish, i.e., anti-Catholic. Why should a Catholic priest be impressed by the claims of a heretical “Judeo-Christian” source, especially when they involve private revelation to a Talmudic Jew concerning the name of the Messiah which the Church has already known for 2000 years? To top it off, I also found out that Fr. Anthony Cekada and Bp. Daniel Dolan—two of the most prominent sedevacantist clerical figures who are largely responsible for the popularization of sedevacantism—are alleged to have been involved in a sodomitical relationship with each other, a claim which to my knowledge neither of them has yet publicly denied as would seem appropriate in the case of their innocence.

The utter lack of camaraderie I found among Catholics and even among sedevacantists whom I reasoned would be more likely to get where I was coming from compelled me to search elsewhere for mutual understanding: namely, the internet. This turned out to be a futile endeavor as just about the only people I found as eager to “spread the truth” about the Jews as I was were fascists, National Socialists, or sympathizers, many of whom were not very interested in Catholicism if at all. Like I said, I ended up imbibing their ideas to a dangerous degree, romanticizing the Third Reich with memes and my own arcane interpretation of history that was lost on just about everyone but me.

I eventually backed off on that enterprise, but the damage was done. By that point I had lost my band, seriously injured myself in an accident spurred by the mental unclarity following an internet flame war, and alienated almost everyone I had been previously been close to. That was when I started to rethink things in a very critical way.

Whereas my response to being accused of anti-Semitism or Nazism was to spitefully imbibe actual anti-Semitism and Nazism so as to prove to my opponents that I was not afraid of them, E. Michael Jones offered a different analysis.

Yes, it is the Jews who are largely to blame for the social ills of the modern world and the state of crisis in the Catholic Church, says Jones. But is that anti-Semitic to observe? No, because anti-Semitism is a biologically deterministic view in contradiction with free will which is invoked to justify solutions to the threat the Jews pose that exclude conversion to the true faith. With that, the Vatican II document condemning anti-Semitism was vindicated, which in turn led me to be more open to a non-sedevacantist perspective on the state of the Church. Though I still wonder about the truth value of the sedevacantist thesis, I no longer consider myself a sedevacantist and no longer generally view non-sedevacantist Catholics as helplessly mired in or willfully contributing to a Satanic conspiracy against Catholic orthodoxy.

To touch briefly on the second point I mention, the extent to which race realism has a place in the conversation, I do want to remark that I think Dr. Jones perhaps underestimates the importance of the racial question in his eagerness to deflect any charges of anti-Semitism. Does not the Bible speak of ancestral sin? Is it anti-Catholic to affirm what biology tells us, that we are predisposed to the same sins as our forefathers, as in the case of alcoholism? In this light, there may well be an obscure genetic component to what Jones terms “the Jewish revolutionary spirit,” especially considering that body and soul are held to be one by Catholic teaching. Does this mean that one originating from the ethnic community genetically shaped by 2000 years of Christ-denial, namely the Jews, is incapable of becoming a saint? By no means. It just means that they might be subject to the same general temptations as their natural predecessors, which they must overcome with Christ’s help. This vindicates the racialist assessment of the general situation to some extent, but of course the spiritual takes precedence over the physical, which does not seem to register with the mentioned fascists and their ilk.

That’s enough for now. I’ve only scratched the surface of these and related issues here and have done so in a less organized and focused manner than I would like, but I expect my analysis and style to improve as I continue to write more. For those who made it this far, thanks for reading.